Primarily because of my line of work, we have a lot of books down here in the basement of our apartment. About a thousand of them. And as anyone who has ever known me even briefly will attest, I am a disorganized person. A dirty, disorganized person. Right now, for instance, my work space is the cleanest it has ever been, and as you'll note, it is not particularly clean:




(For the curious, the pieces of paper are mostly pages from my book; the books are a novel about boxing and Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, and yeah, all those Gatorade bottles have dip spit in them.)

So it goes without saying that our library is very disorganized. Here is the cataloging system we use in our home library:

Step 1: Acquire book.

Step 2: Put it on a shelf.

It's a pretty solid system, except now and again, I will want to find a particular book, and our cataloging system is no good for locating books. Last week, for instance, I was trying to remember Tolstoy's last words for a mental_floss story, which necessitated finding my copy of Henri Troyat's biography of Tolstoy, which of course I could not do.

It was to prevent this very problem that I acquired a book called The New York Public Library's Guide to Organizing Your Home Library. The book is very helpful and even comes with a CD-ROM that allows you to have a computerized catalog of your home library. I got the book a couple months ago, and since then, I've been patiently waiting for a free evening so I might organize my home library.

That evening finally came. And boy, was I excited. I was going to have the best-organized home library in Chicago! But see, I made a terrible mistake. I placed The New York Public Library's Guide to Organizing Your Home Library somewhere in my home library, and I cannot, for the life of me, find it.